How to Protect Your Kids' Privacy Online New ways to keep the Web's trackers, snoops and creeps away from your family

Update:  Reporter Julia Angwin will be on NPR's Fresh Air today to talk about how to erase your digital footprint. Listen in: http://propub.ca/1mD6qmm

From Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin.  For the entire article go here.

If you search for my kids online, you'll find barely a trace of them. Not only do I not post any information or photos of them, I have also taught them to erase their own digital footprints.

My children, whom I will call Woody and Harriet, are 6 and 9. They use fake names online—always. They use software to block online tracking, and instead of Googling homework assignments, they use a search engine that doesn't store any data about their queries. They have stickers that cover their computer cameras. Harriet, my older child, uses an encryption program to scramble her calls and texts to my cellphone, using passwords that are 20 characters long. 

and:

We began by using a password methodology known as Diceware, which produces passwords that are easy to remember but hard for hackers to crack. Diceware is deceptively simple: You roll a six-sided die five times and use the results to pick five random words from the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 short English words. The resulting passwords look something like this: "alger klm curry blond puck.

and:

Harriet also got interested in a program called Ghostery that I use to block online tracking. She particularly liked Ghostery's logo—a cute little blue ghost that sits at the top right corner of her Web browser. So I installed Ghostery on her own computer, an old netbook that we got free when setting up our high-speed Internet connection. She began to view Ghostery as a videogame, with the goal being to find websites with the most trackers. "Mommy, I found one with 41 trackers!" she crowed, running into my room toting her computer.

Harriet even started to like DuckDuckGo, a privacy-protecting search engine whose logo is a cheerful duck in a bow tie. I set it up as her default search engine, and she happily showed the duck off to her friends.

To keep outside snoops away from the family iPad, we found an app from Brian Kennish, a former Google engineer who quit to build privacy-protecting software. His powerful Disconnect Kids app captured all the traffic leaving our iPad and blocked any contact with a list of known mobile tracking companies.